To the Lighthouse, and Buoys, With Toolboxes and Bulbs

Mariners usually steer clear of lighthouses because they often signal shallow water and other hazards, and are typically protected by rugged embankments.

But on a recent weekend, a 26-foot boat bounding over the chop in Long Island Sound cruised straight up to Execution Rocks Light, a lighthouse that sits by a shipping lane that leads out of the East River.

The boat, a steel-hulled United States Coast Guard vessel, nosed up against the big boulders surrounding the lighthouse, allowing two men in blue work jumpsuits to hop out.

The men — Roberto Rivera and Alberto Valdez, both electrician’s mates first class — were conducting a regular maintenance visit. They carried toolboxes and supplies over rocks stained white with sea gull droppings. Overhead, the gulls squawked up a storm.

Before unlocking a padlocked door to enter the lighthouse, Mr. Rivera, 49, knelt down and saw small, off-white eggs filling several nests.

The two electricians belong to the Coast Guard’s aids-to-navigation team, which is based in Bayonne, N.J., and maintains navigational aids from the Shrewsbury River in New Jersey through New York Harbor and up the Hudson River to West Point, as well as in Long Island Sound.

The team inspects, maintains and positions more than 800 buoys in waterways in and around New York City that are equipped with some combination of lights, bells, gongs and devices that emit radar signals.

Team members also maintain the navigational equipment on nine major lighthouses, from Execution Rocks and nearby Stepping Stones Light, south to Sandy Hook Light and Great Beds Light in Raritan Bay.

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Alberto Valdez, far left, and Roberto Rivera, right, arriving at Execution Rocks Light in Long Island Sound with other members of their United States Coast Guard aids-to-navigation team. The men, electrician's mates first class, help to maintain lighthouses and buoys in the waterways in and around New York City.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

Inside Execution Rocks, a 55-foot granite tower, Mr. Valdez and Mr. Rivera mounted an ornate steel staircase that led to a small octagonal room with windows all around. In the center was a modern apparatus powered by a broad bank of solar panels outside.

Mr. Valdez, 35, removed the top of the device and inspected a series of two-ampere bulbs that seemed much smaller than one might imagine a lighthouse lamp to be. In fact, there were a half-dozen bulbs, wired so that if one burned out, the next would be activated. Of the six bulbs, the men replaced three.

“You get one or two used up every three months,” Mr. Valdez said, as he dusted cobwebs off the steel panels and six plastic lenses that surrounded the bulbs to help direct the light and project it as far as 15 miles away.

He checked the bearings that allow the light to rotate fully every 10 seconds, which is what makes it appear to be blinking.

Several months ago, Mr. Rivera said, a problem had occurred with the apparatus.

“It was rotating so fast, it was like a disco light,” he said, while Mr. Valdez kept tinkering.

“No fear, pal, what’s the worst thing that could happen?” Mr. Rivera said to Mr. Valdez, who responded, “It could take off like a windmill.”

Mr. Valdez was standing on a wooden stepladder that had been left in the tower. “We decided it was easier to keep ladders at the lighthouses, rather than having to bring them out and carry them up,” he said.

The men try to bring an extensive selection of tools and parts along on their visits because, Mr. Rivera said, “it’s not like you can run down to the hardware store if you forget something.”

He found the steel door to the balcony jammed and with a firm kick — “It just needs a little influence” — forced it open and walked out onto the circular walkway, which offered broad views of Westchester County, Connecticut, Long Island and the Manhattan skyline.

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Roberto Rivera, an electrician’s mate first class.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

“Out here, it’s just us and the sea gulls,” Mr. Rivera said.

Execution Rocks and the other area lighthouses are inspected about every three months, said Senior Chief Jason Brisson, the Coast Guard officer in charge of the team. He and his group document any structural damage suffered by the equipment it maintains — and sometimes worse. After Hurricane Sandy steamrollered through, a coxswain, Chris Geiser, found that an entire lighthouse, Old Orchard Shoal Light in Lower New York Bay, had been wiped out.

On this day, Mr. Geiser was idling the boat off Execution Rocks as Mr. Rivera and Mr. Valdez checked the solar panels and banks of batteries as well as a fog detector rigged to a foghorn.

The electricians work together frequently in New York. Their job often entails climbing tall buoys and towers to get to lights, no easy task if the buoys are rocking and fresh gull droppings make things slippery and smelly.

The men have an abundance of lighthouse stories, such as the one about the time Mr. Rivera found a goose trapped in West Bank Light. He grabbed the bird with a tarp, he said, and released it outside “where her boyfriend was squawking at her to come out.”

They speak fondly of each lighthouse, including Staten Island Light, with its huge lens and 1,000-watt bulb that “warms up the whole room.”

Before leaving Execution Rocks, Mr. Rivera and Mr. Valdez inspected and added water to the battery cells on a lower floor of the tower, and found that two of the eight large solar panels outside needed replacing. They joked about the legend that the lighthouse was haunted and how it had gotten its name from accounts of British colonial soldiers executing people by chaining them to the rocks and leaving them to drown in the rising tide.

They walked through the attached lightkeeper’s house, which had not had a regular occupant in 35 years. It was sold at federal auction to a Philadelphia man who opened it last summer as a bed-and-breakfast with accommodations that he described as “indoor camping.”

Each of the three bedrooms can fit two guests. The rate is $300 a night per room, which includes a cot or air mattress and bottled drinking water. Guests are expected to provide their own food, ice and sleeping bags.

Mr. Rivera, who grew up in the Bronx and is preparing to retire in several months, said he found the idea of living in a lighthouse appealing — to an extent.

“That wouldn’t be a bad deal,” he said. “You could go boating and fishing all summer.” Winters, he added, would be another story: “You’d freeze.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: To the Lighthouse, and Buoys, With Toolboxes and Bulbs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe